PORT HARBOR — June ‘21

A Monthly Letter from the Founders

ANCHOR POINT

In a cosmic burst of irony, thousands of our users have had to endure a poor user experience with the platform we designed to improve the consumer experience. 😕

We understand the struggle, and we’re very sorry for all of the frustration endured.

We had previously shared many of the contributors that delayed or sabotaged some of our plans, and we were agile enough to respond in the ways needed, but lots of our users suffered in the process nonetheless. Forgive us; we’ve since made some adjustments and we hope you’ll sail your vessels back upon our shores some day soon.

Building in public isn’t for the faint of heart. Let alone building publicly in the blockchain space. But we’re well prepared and confident in our approach. I’ve been committed to the Zilliqa community for years now, and our project has been publicly documented since its inception. Our hope is that we can be an example for startups coming behind us that want to solve real problems with blockchain-as-a-service business models, particularly from the US.

But improvements are necessary. Many of which are underway now. Crypto markets remain a sea of uncertainty, but as the initial hype cycle dies down, behind the scenes at PackagePortal, the energy level is at an all time high for multiple reasons. Most notably, the engineering team beginning their full time employment last week. After 20+ months of learning new programming languages and coding as the day-job permitted, the team can now devote their full time to PackagePortal development on a daily basis. This is a marathon, but now we’re warmed up and can do some sprinting.

THE APP

Backend work for v2.0 is fast underway. A number of UI improvements and efficiency upgrades will be added, allowing users to see which scans are being credited. We’ve also got a KYC element being introduced, and implementation of pre-scan validation, to increase throughput. Additionally, iterative updates throughout the year will add token balance views and amazon integration.

One of the main problems with users not being credited, was due to the wildly varying standards for tracking number formatting. Many users were scanning codes from unsupported carriers, as well as scanning the wrong codes for the carriers we do support. Some of the updates coming will automatically scope tracking numbers to the proper user when shipped. This will improve tracking accuracy and the user experience. And we’ll also be working on better educating users about which tracking numbers are acceptable.

THE BUSINESS

Our core team has been bolstered by a number of community members who joined us early, and continue to provide value. The official team now extends to Holland, London, Dubai, South Africa, Spain, Ireland and India, with more to come. This includes 3 additions to our Advisory Board; Jonathan Poyser, who deals in private equity with a Big 4 consulting firm, Ciaran McNamee who comes from the investment banking sector, and Aidan Finn, a business operations expert and entrepreneur. All three bring valued expertise and contributions, that accelerate our strategic maneuvering.

Another reason our excitement level is only going up, is due to very promising calls with key individuals from various organizations. We cannot disclose many details of who we’re talking with, as discussions are ongoing, but we can share that we’ve got an Alaskan CBD manufacturer committed, and we’re in talks with pharmaceutical and beverage companies, as well as white label manufacturers, an international carrier, and a top five online retailer.

We are well positioned to provide value to all of them, and are doing backend (and back office) work necessary to onboard institutions with ease. It’s evident that our service and access to consumers at the moment of delivery, is highly sought after among e-commerce professionals. As a result, we are prepping the rails and backend mods to be able to accommodate integrations with global brands and organizations.

THE TOKENS

PORT has been live on ZilSwap for about 6 months now, and its endured quite a dynamic cycle. A perfect storm of market timing & structure, along with hype, & whale manipulation, saw liquidity, market cap, and price all vary wildly.

XPORT’s scan contract received dismal deposits over the month of May. Speculation around the future of XPORT could play a role. We knew ahead of time that conversions would be a slower curve starting small. That’s why Summer Shipments were introduced in the XPORT proposal. When those end in November, it brings to close a year-long campaign of heavy rewards for PORT holders and LPs on ZilSwap. From there, it’s all about scans…and we anticipate a growing user base earning and generating rewards for the ecosystem.

Lastly, the coming ETH bridge is important for $PORT, an ERC-20 version of the token will enable more pools on more platforms. This will deepen liquidity, and broaden our reach and visibility. Decentralized exchanges will be added first. Those on the early list of consideration are UniSwap, SushiSwap, and PancakeSwap. More to come as the bridge draws near.

A Final Word:

By J.G. Whitley

As the CEO and originator of the PackagePortal platform, I’ve been torn the last few months. While lots of people around me began congratulating us and celebrating 100x returns, those closest to me know that I have yet to celebrate….still to this day.

The initial hype and market pump threw us into an orbit that was well off of our charted course. While a volume spike of new users like we saw is typically cherished by startups, all I could think about was the fact that we weren’t ready to scale, and I was handling ALL user support requests solo. So when we went from 300 users to around 50k users in a couple of weeks, my focus wasn’t on boasting in growth, but rather on how we would ever find time to sleep or eat.

Our exponential growth was also paralleled by sophisticated attackers, which only compounded the level of difficulty. When PackagePortal came along and commoditized barcodes, bad actors subsequently raided and plundered enterprise systems for tracking codes. Even after reinforcing our infrastructure, we learned that the tracking numbers from numerous major carriers across the globe are very poorly secured, if at all. So now, the bad actors have begun hacking carriers…in efforts to defraud us.

Amid all of this, if you had any degree of response from PackagePortal “support” before mid April, whether on twitter or email or anywhere else, it was me alone. Talk about being outgunned. We’ve since brought in reinforcements, and are continually activating new team members around the globe.

For those of you still with us, thank you for your continued support and patience. We have every intention of adding value to those of you who stick around and rock with us. It sounds so cliche, but we’ve really only just begun. And I couldn’t be more excited to ride the coming waves with you all.

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